But my 16-year-old son Cole? Smart. Really smart. Not off the charts Stephen Hawking smart, but…. he’s got gray matter to spare, even if he does his utmost to hide that fact from his teachers and classmates. (He gets it from his mother.)

And that has been an enormous problem for us, his doting parents. We discovered early on that Cole’s brain moves much too quickly for our public education system; he learned that whatever was going on inside his head was far more interesting than what was going on inside the classroom. This has been the bane of our existence ever since. I won’t go into our excruciating battles with his teachers or trying to persuade him to adopt alternative educational methods, since traditional high school is utterly boring and pointless. (My lovely wife does an excellent job of that here.)

We tried to tell him high school would suck. We made him watch Freaks and Geeks and every John Hughes movie ever made. But did he listen? No. He wants to be normal. Like that’s any great prize.

Long story short: Despite having a keen mind for mathematics, he is floundering in calculus. Endless sessions with Saul Kahn at the Kahn Academy were helping, but not enough. So we decided it was time for a tutor.

This did not sit at all well with my son, who aside from being one of the most stubborn bipeds on the planet is also a little freaked out by a) talking to a stranger, and b) admitting he doesn’t know something. So getting him to agree to a tutor took weeks of arguing.

Eventually I had to invoke the “no tutor, no computer” rule. If he didn’t agree to get some kind of academic help, he’d be back to using a pencil, paper, and abacus to do his homework.

We decided to try out a new online tutoring service called InstaEDU. (By “we” in that sentence, of course, I mean my wife.) It looked promising: Dozens of college students from the crème de la crème of higher education – Berkeley, MIT, Yale, Princeton, and so on – available to offer one-on-one help via video chat and IM for $24 to $30 an hour. And all of them looked like Abercrombie & Fitch models. At least, the ones on the home page did.

It looked promising, so I signed up and told my son to find a calculus tutor and set up an appointment. Predictably, a week passed and he had done absolutely nothing about it. So I set one up for him with Ross, a graduate math student at CalTech who’d won some teaching awards. Ross couldn’t do it at the time I requested (6 pm ET) so he suggested 9 pm. That was a little late but I said OK. I wanted to get this done. InstaEDU sent us both a confirmation email and a reminder with a link to the session. We were good to go.

At 5:40 pm on the day of the session I get an email from InstaEDU. Ross needs to reschedule; could we possibly do it at the original time, or 20 minutes from now? Surely I thought that was a mistake, so I contacted InstaEDU.

One of the nice things about InstaEDU is they have a “community manager” available via chat on their Web site. Community manager Sophie assured me this was not a glitch, Ross probably had someone cancel and wanted to see if Cole was available. If not, we could stick to the original time.

Because I wasn’t home and there was no way I could ensure that my son would actually attend the session, I said let’s stick to 9 pm. Sophie said that was fine.

At 6:20 I receive an email from Sophie. Ross called to say his car had broken down and he couldn’t make our 9 pm session. She’s looking for a substitute tutor and will get back to me. I am starting to suspect Ross has a hot date with another Abercrombie & Fitch model and is blowing us off, but I say OK, fine.

I ask my son to log in and make sure everything is working, which is when we run into our next problem: InstaEDU needs a login email and password for my son. Apparently I set these up when I signed up, but I can’t remember doing that (again, not surprising). I look in my gmail inbox; there’s no confirmation email from InstaEDU with that information in it. When I log into my own account (whose password I do remember) there is no way to access any information about my son’s account. It’s as if he doesn’t exist. I go back and forth a bit with Sophie on this before I just tell Cole to have InstaEDU to send him a password reset. It does, and after some nagging from me to check his inbox he’s able to log in.

Sophie emails back and says she’s found a great math tutor named Adam who would be happy to fill in for Ross. I say OK. So at 9 pm my son is sitting in front of his laptop with his calculus book, his homework, and a pencil, waiting. He wants to do this about as much as he wants to go have his teeth drilled, but he’s doing it nonetheless. I am proud of him.

At 9:05 he’s still waiting. Then it’s 9:10 and still no sign of Adam. I chat Sophie and ask her what’s up. She apologizes profusely, says this is “very uncharacteristic” of InstaEDU, and suggests Cole do an On Demand search to find an instructor right now. I suggest that to my son, who is less than keen. We decide to wait a few more minutes.

By 9:25 pm it’s clear that Adam is on a double date with Ross and two A&F models, so I persuade my son to try InstaEDU’s On Demand tutors. The result: “No AB Calculus tutors are available right now.”

Back to Sophie: “It looks like a couple of our tutors tried to connect, but weren’t able to get their video feeds loaded in under 5 minutes.”

I tell Sophie I am beginning to understand why InstaEDU still has the word ‘beta’ on its home page. (Though that doesn’t stop them from collecting money for these services.) She begs for another chance to connect my son with a tutor and I grudgingly agree. After another ten minutes she’s got one cued up for him, and I persuade Cole to go ahead with the session.

After that, things went fine. His tutor appeared in a small window on my son’s laptop. I heard giggling and talking and thought Cole was joking around with her, but then realized it was people in the background; apparently she was hunkered down over her laptop in a dorm room while her roommates were having a lively conversation.

I really expected him to cut the session short, but he stuck with it for 38 minutes. At the end I asked him. Did it help? Yes, he said, it did. Was it fun? He looked at me.

“Dad, it was a tutor.”

Would he do it again? Yes, he said, if he felt he needed it. OK then.

I told Sophie she owed me some free tutorial time for my pain and suffering, and she added an hour to our account. The next day I received a personal apology from InstaEDU’s CEO, Alison Johnston. She wrote:

I heard that you had a horrible time getting a calculus lesson for your son today, so I wanted to send you a personal apology. Our main goal is to allow students to get great academic support extremely easily, and today we obviously failed. Situations like this are rare but unacceptable. Study time is valuable, and it’s our job to make sure that we’re allowing students and their families to make the best possible use of it.

Johnston may have sent this because I was clearly so put out by this experience, or it may be because my email signature identified me as a member of the press, I’m not sure. But it was a classy touch nonetheless.

I really like the concept of having the best and brightest college students tutor my kids. But I remember what I was like in college – not the most rock-solid reliable human being on the planet. And I suspect the folks at InstaEDU are discovering that as well. Smart and attractive does not alone a good teacher make.

Lesson learned, I hope.

“Mom! What’s the Internet password?”

As usual it was less of a question and more of an accusation. Our 13-year-old, as angry as only a hormone-charged teen girl can be, discovered we had once again changed the pass code for the WiFi router. She stormed into the kitchen where we were sitting and glared at us.

“Do your homework.” Her mother replied, serenely sipping coffee.

The teen rolled her eyes.

“No, mom, really, what is it?

“Do your homework.”

“Come on mom, just tell me.” More plaintive. We can sense her will starting to collapse.

“Do your homework.”

“Is it ‘banana peel’? Is it ‘Bieber2012′? Is it ‘Pomegranate’?”

“Do. Your. Homework.”

“What is it?”

A half hour later, homework now completed, my daughter walks back into the kitchen. You can almost see the cartoon light bulb blink on over her head.

“Wait,” she said. “Is the password ‘do your homework’? It is, isn’t it? Oh my god I hate you.”

Stomp stomp stomp — SLAM! Followed shortly thereafter by the sound of typing and giggling.

We don’t do this to our daughter and her older brother simply because it’s so much fun to torment them. We do it because once they have Internet access, time stops. Nothing else happens. Socks do not get picked up. Homework goes undone. Dishes do not get cleared from the rooms where they weren’t supposed to be in the first place. Left unchecked, cobwebs would form around their bodies as they sat mesmerized by flickering images on YouTube and the constant stream of inanity that is a teenager on Facebook.

Withholding technology is one of the most effective ways to guide your children’s behavior, whether it’s a cell phone or Net access. But, make no mistake, this can also be a lot of fun. Over the years we’ve used a series of WiFi router pass phrases like:

• No that’s not it
• Sorry guess again
• I have no idea
• Ask your father
• Password? What password?

And so on. (To be fair, I deserve no credit for this – it was really my wife’s idea.)

Once the kids figured out the rules of this game, we had to get more sophisticated. For one thing, we quickly realized it was a total pain to constantly change the WiFi passwords for every box in our house that wanted it (like the Roku, TiVo, Sonos player, laptops, tablets, etc). So we created a guest account that only the kids could use, and just changed that password.

Lately we’ve got a new tool in our tech parenting arsenal: A Cisco EA4500 router, which works with the company’s free Connect Cloud service. Download the Connect Cloud app to your laptop or tablet, and you can see every device that’s on your wireless network and cut them off one by one. Room not clean? That laptop gets booted from the network until it is. Throwing off a little too much attitude? Let’s see how you like being Amish grounded for a week.

In the battle for digital supremacy, many parents feel hopelessly outmatched. But you hold the secret key; you control the horizontal and the vertical. You have the WiFi password. Don’t give it up without getting something good in return.

This post originally appeared on Mashable.

No WiFi image from MobileWhack.

These rules will vary depending on your kids’ ages and personalities, so you’ll probably need to have this talk at least once a year. But here are five things you definitely should not do.

1. Forbid them from joining Facebook

Maybe you think Facebook is a bad idea, and maybe your progeny are among the 0.3 percent who actually do what their parents tell them. But if your kids want to be on Facebook, they’re going to be on Facebook – if not from home then from their phones, their friend’s computers, PCs at the school or library, and so on. It’s just too easy to do and too hard to police. It’s much better if they do it on your watch.

2. Embarrass your kids

Embarrassing your kids in public is one of the great perks of parenting. But do it on Facebook and they will defriend you faster than you can say “Mark Zuckerberg is a knob.” For example, when my daughter first joined Facebook (like many kids, well before before the official minimum age of 13) she would constantly send me game invites. Now that she’s a teenager, she’d really rather pretend I don’t exist. God help me if I post anything to her Wall or comment on anything she posts. In short: I can lurk, but I can’t Like.

3. Make their friends your friends

You want to be friends with your kids on Facebook, if for no other reason than to keep an eye on them. But sending friend requests to your children’s friends, regardless of your motives, is just creepy. If they reach out and friend you, though, it’s OK to say yes. Just don’t start posting stuff on their Walls (see Rule #2).

4. Bring the hammer down

Admonishing your kids on Facebook is a really bad idea. I made this mistake a few years ago, scolding my son in the comments when he posted a really nasty status update, which I heard about from some mutual adult friends. (Turns out he was quoting a rap lyric.) It took years before he was willing to re-friend me after that. What I should have done was talk to him offline and convince him to tone it down – or at least make it clear that he was quoting, so my friends could call Jay Z’s mother and blame her instead.

And the final thing you should never do on Facebook is…. Continue reading on Mashable.

Despite clear advantages in size, strength, intellect, and moral tenacity (all of which have evaporated over time as my children have grown), there isn’t really all that much you can do to control your kids’ behavior, ultimately. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it doesn’t make being a parent any easier.

I first began to realize this when my son Cole was roughly 18 months old. For reasons that have become obscure over time, I was left alone with him on a Saturday morning while my wife went off to get her hair done or possibly have an affair. Maybe she simply parked the car around the block, climbed into the back seat, and grabbed a couple of hours of uninterrupted sleep. In those days, sleep was like opium, chocolate, and sex rolled into one – hypnotic and fleeting, the most glorious thing one could imagine.

I opened the fridge, saw we were out of milk (or possibly beer), and decided to embark on a father and son outing to the grocery store. At that time he was probably parked in his favorite chair watching Toy Story for the 173^rd time. I picked him up, carried him outside, and attempted to put him in his car seat. He would have none of it. Whatever his agenda was that day, a trip to Safeway was not part of it.

Cole made his objections known loudly and vociferously. I thought: I’m the adult here. I’m bigger, stronger, and presumably smarter than this 30-pound bundle of muscle and attitude. If I say we’re going to the store, we’re going to the store, dammit.

But it was like trying to stuff a wolverine into a shoe box. Somewhere between the living room and the garage the kid had grown an extra leg and three more arms. I’d slip a foot through the harness of the car seat and he’d yank back his arm; I’d manage to secure one arm and his feet would come unmoored. And the noise, well. Gangland slayings have transpired at a lower decibel level.

I should note that by this point the willfulness of my son was already legendary. Maggie, our first OBGYN, noted it when he was still in the womb and refused to come out well after his 40 weeks were up. He was warm, well fed, and perfectly happy to stay there as long as his mom would have him. The kid was 10 and a half pounds when Maggie finally escorted him from the premises via C-section, bawling his head off. If he’d had teeth he might have bitten her.

Cole has been this way ever since. Every doctor, every teacher, and virtually every adult who has ever met my son has noted his remarkable intransigence. It has helped make schooling him a challenge, to say the least.

So as my son was bucking and twisting, acting like I was trying to waterboard him when all I wanted to do was go to the goddamn store, I remember thinking about Mao’s dictum that power comes at the end of a gun muzzle; that, in the end, the authority of the state derives from its ability to do you harm. I realized that the only way to get him into that seat was to get truly physical, and a stupid trip to Safeway just wasn’t worth it.

So we went without milk, or beer, or whatever it was. He returned to communing with Buzz and Woody, and I went back to doing whatever it was I was doing, albeit in somewhat grumpier fashion.

My son is now 16. More than a few times over the years I have wondered whether a few well timed, well intentioned beatings might have made him a little more pliable and our lives a little easier.

But I never wanted to be that kind of father. And knowing my son I don’t think it would have done much good. That stubbornnesss is hard wired; I don’t think anything could have beat it out of him. All it would have done is drive a wedge between us.

My daughter Ava, three years Cole’s junior, is a different case altogether. She has her moments for sure, but she lacks my son’s singular stubbornness. She has a much greater talent for taking the long view and manipulating the situation to her own advantage. If it were her I was trying to squeeze into that car seat, she’d have managed to get a cookie out of the deal.

Ultimately I decided the only way to impose your will on your kids is to raise spineless children or do it at the end of a gun, metaphorically speaking. And why would you want to?

I want my kids to develop their own world views. I want them to respect the power of authority but not to blindly follow it. I want them to make their own decisions, good, bad, or ugly. Ultimately that’s what’s going to happen, regardless of what I do. As a parent all I can do is try to steer them in a good direction. I can’t guarantee they will arrive at the destination I would have chosen.

I believe my son’s stubbornness will serve him well over time. I hope it will ultimately allow him to find his own north star and follow it, regardless of the obstacles or the criticism of others. I know for certain it will make him a more interesting adult. Provided, of course, we can ever persuade him to leave the house.

Actual wolverine courtesy of National Geo. No animals or children were harmed in the making of this blog post.

But Ava’s no tomboy either. She will happily rifle her mother’s vanity and steal her most expensive cosmetics. And she never leaves the house without Nigel, a pocket-sized, formerly-white polar bear turned gray with time and affection.

Our normal father-daughter activities consist mostly of Ava dragging me into stores and demanding I buy her things. This summer, however, we decided to take a scuba diving class. Translation: Her mother (a veteran diver) decided the kids were old enough to learn scuba, our 14-year-old Cole decided he was way too cool for that, and I decided to tag along with Ava.

Which is how we ended up crammed into a noisy utility room at the back of a dive shop with Brad, a world-weary instructor in his late 20s, three beefy guys serving in various branches of the military, and one skinny surfer dude.

“Scuba,” Brad shouted above the thrumming of machines generating compressed air to fill the tanks, “is one of the safest sports in the world, ranked 34th between golf and billiards in the frequency of injuries.”

He then listed the various reasons we could end up being medevac’d to the nearest hospital – decompression sickness, pulmonary embolisms, garden variety drowning. Because no matter how injury-prone it might be, billiards does not involve strapping on 40 pounds of gear, sinking to the bottom of the ocean, and swimming with sharks.

The key to safety, Brad explained, was the buddy system. Ava and I were buddies. If she got in trouble, I would step in. If I ran out of air, we’d both breathe from her tank.

We started out using our gear in a swimming pool, then a lake, and finally in open water. I don’t know which of us was more terrified to simulate an out-of-air experience in that pool. The lake was so murky we had to virtually touch masks to see each other. We ended up lost and sputtering on the surface more than once. Then again, so did all those macho guys. It was gratifying to watch my 85-pound daughter hold her own with the paratrooper and the surfer.

Ava’s mom joined us for our open water ocean dive. So the three of us, together, explored an artificial reef created by a sunken liberty ship. We saw schools of spadefish, rays, scorpion fish, a lot of spare tires.

Afterward Ava was lit up in a way I hadn’t seen before. “That was cool,” she said. “When can we do it again?”

A few days later we were strolling on the beach and, as usual, she handed me her bag to carry. I looked inside.

“Where’s Nigel?” I asked.

“Jeez, Dad, I don’t bring him everywhere.” And then she punched me.

Now Ava says she wants to be a marine photographer when she grows up. Next month, of course, that might change to veterinarian (or possibly prizefighter). One thing I hope won’t change, though, is that we’ll always remain buddies: diving deep together, helping each other when one of us gets lost, sharing the same air.

Note: This piece originally appeared in the February 2011 issue of Family Circle. Everybody is a little older now.

Image: I will probably get sued for using that image, but I found it on DVDverdict (so please, Disney attorneys, sue them first).

That’s my 16-year-old son swerving that car through those pylons in that blurry cell phone video. No, he was not joyriding. He was learning how to become a safer driver – and having a bit of fun while doing it.

Seated next to him was Jeff Fuller, a professional NASCAR driver who volunteers his time for B.R.A.K.E.S, which stands for Be Responsible And Keep Everyone Safe.

This past weekend my son and I made the four-hour trek to the zMax raceway north of Charlotte, NC, to attend the B.R.A.K.E.S. sessions. Needless to say there was some grumbling involved. “This is the last time I say yes to anything Mom asks me to do,” he carped from the passenger seat. Me, I had no great passion for driving 4+ hours to and from a 4-hour driving session either, but I wanted my son to be a better driver than I was at his age (and really, better than I am now).

The B.R.A.K.E.S. Teen Pro-Active Driving School was started by drag racer Doug Herbert in 2008 after he lost his two teenage sons in a car accident. His 17 year old was driving, his 12 year old was in the passenger seat. It’s a charity run entirely on donations; parents are asked to provide a check for $99 for each student, which they are welcome to take back after the sessions are over. I doubt any of the 30 or so parents who attended our session took their money back.

While the parents watch, professional drivers take the kids in groups of three and work them through a series of courses designed to sharpen their skills and open their eyes.

For example: The instructors tell the kids to accelerate through a surface slick with water, then yank the emergency brake to cause a skid. The purpose: To teach kids how to turn into the skid and regain control of the car. They make them to drive through a figure 8 course with wooden cutouts of schoolkids and other vulnerable obstacles at the edges, then force them to text on their phones or answer questions or blast the radio while driving. The reason? To teach them that distracted driving is bad driving.

As we learned before the sessions, it takes an average of 4.6 seconds to read a text – during which time a car traveling at 45 mph covers the length of a football field. Fatalities from texting while driving are reaching such epidemic proportions that Congress is debating whether to pass a national law banning it.

In other courses, the kids are told to drive as fast as possible towards a small barrier, then jam on the brake pedal and veer to one side. The goal here is to teach them how anti-lock brake systems work, and how they can still retain control over the vehicle even while braking hard. They have to deliberately veer onto the shoulder of the road, then safely guide the car back onto the pavement – so they don’t panic and make a fatal mistake when it happens to them in real life.

Parents got to drive part of the course too. My favorite – and, as it turns out, my son’s favorite – was the slalom in the video above. It was fun yanking the wheel and hearing the tires squeal while knowing the car was designed to do exactly that. Unfortunately, I ended up murdering several cones along the way.

I asked my son the best thing he’d learned. He said it was that he could control the car if it ever went into a skid. That was something he’d been worried about. The added confidence my son has behind the wheel was easily worth $99 and the eight-hour commute.

B.R.A.K.E.S. taught 3000 teens to be better drivers last year. Yet that’s still only half the number of annual teen car fatalities. They’re trying to take the program nationwide, and looking for donations to help them reach that goal. If you’ve got a leadfoot teenager itching to get his or her hands behind the wheel, I would highly recommend teaching them to put on the B.R.A.K.E.S. And if there isn’t a school near you, you should contact these folks and see what it will take to get one.

I am still feeling my way through what this will be, though I suspect it will end up as a repository for all the stuff I feel like writing about that doesn’t quite fit into the other 346 blogs. And I’m hoping to find a better design template than the one I have now. (Suggestions welcome.)

Not to worry, eventually it will all get cleaned up — if the Mayan Apocalypse doesn’t strike before then. Either way, problem solved.

Cheers,

The Dork

Image: Courtesy of Zazzle.